At the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in Frankfurt, we met Richard Padley of Semantico. He spoke at the conference about mobile platforms from the perspective of publishers faced with multiple delivery models including apps and the web. We started off our interview with Richard Padley by asking: What does the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement mean to you? So, is it the end of paper? Even if I tell you that 30% of IFRC’s membership don’t have e-mail? Many people seem to think that PDF is a usable digital format for publications. So, what’s wrong with PDF? Even though EPUB is the basis for eBooks, in 2010 few people are familiar with this format. What’s right with EPUB? The Kindle is a single-purpose device. It does one thing, and is meant to it well enough to convince people who love printed books to cross the digital divide. …
Katja Mruck on starting a peer-reviewed open access journal
In 2001, Katja Mruck started a peer-reviewed multilingual open access journal FQS – Forum on qualitative social research. In this interview, recorded at the Third Conference on Scholarly Publishing in Berlin, Germany (28 September 2011), she explains what ingredients were needed to make the journal’s launch a success. Mruck is the Coordinator open access and e-publishing, Center for Digital Systems CeDis), Freie Universität Berlin.
Masooda Bano: the impact of international aid on volunteering and development
The negative impact of aid on development has been a recurring and controversial subject in recent years. Drawing on her extensive research in this field, Masooda Bano asserts that there is a strong negative correlation between foreign aid, and voluntary organisations’ ability to mobilise communities. Masooda Bano is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development & Wolfson College, University of Oxford, with a DPhil from Oxford and MPhil from Cambridge. Her work focuses on real life development puzzles with a focus on mapping the micro-level behaviour and incentive structures drawing on rich empirical data especially ethnographic studies. Dangerous Correlations: Aid’s Impact on NGOs’ Performance and Ability to Mobilize Members in Pakistan